Prometheus CloudWatch Exporter

How to Integrate Prometheus CloudWatch Exporter with Apica Ascent 1. Introduction

This guide explains how to collect AWS service metrics using Prometheus CloudWatch Exporter and send them to Apica Ascent for monitoring and visualization. You’ll learn:

• How to install and configure CloudWatch Exporter

• How to set up Prometheus to scrape CloudWatch metrics

• How to connect Prometheus with Apica Ascent

• How to visualize AWS metrics in dashboards

2. Install and Run Prometheus CloudWatch Exporter

Binary installation:

Download the latest release from https://github.com/prometheus/cloudwatch_exporter

Containerized deployment:

Use the official Docker image:

docker run -p 9106:9106 \
-v /path/to/config.yml:/config/config.yml \
  prom/cloudwatch-exporter

By default, CloudWatch Exporter runs on port 9106 and exposes metrics at:

http://<host-ip>:9106/metrics

3. Configure Prometheus to Scrape CloudWatch Exporter

Update prometheus.yml:

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: "cloudwatch_exporter"
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["<host-ip>:9106"]

Restart Prometheus and verify on /targets page that metrics are being scraped.

4. Connect Prometheus to Apica Ascent

Add remote_write configuration to prometheus.yml:

remote_write:
  - url: "https://ascent-pre.apica.io/v1/receive/prometheus"
    tls_config:
      insecure_skip_verify: true
    authorization:
      type: "Bearer"
      credentials: "<YOUR_INGEST_TOKEN>"

• More on remote_write

• Generate an ingest token

Optional: Relabel metrics for easier identification:

write_relabel_configs:
  - action: replace
    source_labels: [__name__]
    regex: "(.*)"
    target_label: __name__
    replacement: "ascent_$1"

5. Verify Metrics in Apica Ascent

• Log in to Apica Ascent

• Navigate to Queries → New Query

Example queries:

aws_ec2_cpuutilization_average
aws_sqs_numberofmessagessent_sum

6. Example Dashboards

Create dashboards for AWS services:

• EC2 Overview: CPU %, Network I/O, Disk Ops

• SQS Overview: Messages Sent, Queue Depth

Alerts:

• EC2 CPU > 80%

• SQS queue length > threshold

7. Troubleshooting

• Exporter not reachable → Check port 9106 and container logs.

• Prometheus not scraping → Validate prometheus.yml.

• Metrics missing in Apica → Check remote_write URL and token.

• AWS permissions → Ensure IAM role has CloudWatch read access.